Phooey to Fees to Stinky El Salvador

Good old President Donald Trump’s brain is like a machine gun, spitting out good ideas so fast that sometimes he comes up with too many at once. His ponderous output was in evidence this week. 

On Monday, his Secretary of State Marco Rubio made El Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele agree of his very own accord (because it was such a good idea) to accept deported immigrants from the U.S. and welcome into his famous prisons¹ any American criminals Trump decided to send.² He would have to charge a fee, though. Bukele insisted on that. Trump said well, okay. In his appreciation, Rubio effused: “No country’s ever made an offer of friendship such as this.” He added the offer was “the most unprecedented and extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world.”³

On Tuesday, Trump announced that he — or rather the United States — would “own” the demolition site called Gaza. Another splendid idea and on the very next day! It was so splendid Trump forgot all about his El Salvador idea. Yes, Trump figured Gaza should be all cleaned up — imagine that! — cleaned up and made into a Riviera-type place that even a Trump would approve of. But why would Trump want to do that when a much more splendid idea was right before his nose? 

Why not turn that so-called demolition site called Gaza into the biggest open-air prison in the world? How does that sound? Tell that squirming, obsequious El Salvadoran president to stuff it — Trump loves doing that — and ship those deported migrants and American prisoners to Gaza. That shifty Nayib Bukele was offering a measly 40K places for Trump’s deplorables and for a fee. Trump could cram 2 million into Gaza, he knew that. And he would tell those inmates to make like Palestinians and fix things up all pretty or they will be on their way to El Salvador. That would do the trick. Get the inmates to roll all that rubble into great piles, make something useful of it, like ovens to bake their bread. Meanwhile, Israel would have a place to test its new weapons and surveillance techniques and get the bugs out of its “Where’s Daddy?” software. No fees, no overhead. Everybody would be happy.

Here’s the best part: Once those inmates have the place all cleaned up, Trump will most unexpectedly decide to do his other great idea instead, to wit, turn the place into a super-lux Riviera. He’d have to get rid of those 2 million deplorables, but no problem. It’s been done before, and should those ovens be needed, why, there they’d be.

1. “Human rights organisations have documented arbitrary arrests, torture, enforced disappearances, massive violations of due process and dangerously unsanitary conditions” in El Salvadoran prisons. “Juanita Goebertus, the director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch, told the Guardian that people in El Salvador’s prisons ‘lose all communication with their families and any meaningful legal recourse and are exposed to gang recruitment and state torture.’ . . . In 2023, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported that there had been more than 6,400 documented cases of human rights abuses [in El Salvador’s prisons] and that 174 people had died in state custody.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/04/el-salvador-deportees-incarcerated-us-citizens ↩︎
2. American criminals like Dr. Anthony Fauci, Mark Milley, Mark Esper, Jack Smith, Liz Cheney, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, oh, the list of dangerous elements at large in America goes on and on, all people it is best Americans hear no more from and wouldn’t if those elements could be secured in El Salvadoran prisons. ↩︎
3. Probably because it is illegal. ↩︎